APILayer resume parser: what it returns and costs

Published 25 September 2026

The APILayer resume parser is a hosted Resume Parser API sold on the APILayer marketplace. You send it a PDF, DOC or DOCX (the page lists no image or scanned-page support), either as an upload or as a public URL, and it returns JSON with a name, an email, a flat list of skills, and short education and experience entries. As of September 2026 its marketplace page lists a free plan of 100 requests a month, a Starter plan at $29.99 a month for 1,500 requests, a Pro plan at $49.99 a month for 4,500, and a custom plan by contact.

That answers what it is. The rest of this article is for the developer deciding whether to build on it: what the response actually contains, where it fits well, who should stay with it, and when a parser that returns a fuller typed resume is the better choice. We build ResumeJSON, so read this as written by an interested party. Every figure about APILayer below was read from its own marketplace page in September 2026, and that page is theirs to change.

The short verdict

The decision is mostly about the shape of the response, not the price. The two sets of plans sit close to each other. What differs is how much code you write after the call.

What the APILayer resume parser returns

APILayer's page describes the service plainly:

Parses any resume/CV into JSON text using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

It offers two endpoints: one that fetches a resume from a publicly reachable URL ("pdf/docx/doc formats supported", with no mention of a scan or a photo), and one that takes the file bytes as an upload. The sample response on the page has five top-level keys:

• name and email
• skills, a flat array of strings
• education, entries with a name and a dates string
• experience, entries with title, dates, location and organization

In the published sample, dates is a single year such as "2015", and there is no phone number, headline, links, certifications or languages section. Treat the sample as a sample: a real CV may yield more. But it is the contract the page shows, and it is worth holding your own documents against it before you commit.

On languages, the page says the parser "is well tested for English language" and "generates somehow acceptable results for 12 more most common languages". On privacy it states that uploaded files "are parsed and automatically deleted after 15 seconds" and that parsed data is not stored.

What APILayer charges

As of September 2026, the plan cards on the marketplace page read:

At the full quota that works out to about $0.020 a request on Starter and about $0.011 on Pro. For bulk parsing the page asks you to email for "competitive discounts". The page does not publish an overage rate, so plan for what happens when a month runs past the quota before you ship it into an upload flow.

What ResumeJSON returns instead

ResumeJSON takes a PDF, a DOCX, plain text, or a photo or scan of a page, and returns one typed resume object. The field reference is the full list; the parts that differ most from the sample above are these:

• Every role, with sortable dates. start_date is always YYYY-MM or YYYY, and a role with no end date comes back with is_current: true, so a current job never reads as a job with missing dates.
• Contact details in one place. basics carries full name, email, phone, location, headline and links.
• Certifications and languages as their own arrays, plus total_years_experience.
• Nothing invented. A field the CV does not state is null, never an empty string and never a guess.
• Scans and photos. A PDF with no text layer, or an uploaded JPEG, PNG or WebP, is read as an image, and meta.read tells you which path it took. If that is your problem, our OCR resume parser article goes further.
• Output language on request. Pass output_language and the text values come back translated, while names, emails and dates are left as written.

Median parse time is 2.2 seconds against the live endpoint, and each response carries an X-Parse-Ms header so you can see it on your own calls.

Price, side by side

ResumeJSON's plans are sold through RapidAPI, and the table on our pricing and quickstart page reads:

Set against APILayer's cards:

• Under 100 a month, both are free.
• A few hundred a month, unevenly, the pay-per-use plan costs $0.05 a parse and nothing in a quiet month; 300 parses is $15.
• Around 1,500 a month, APILayer Starter is $29.99. On ResumeJSON Ultra, 1,500 parses is $29 plus 500 at $0.045, so $51.50.
• Around 4,500 a month, APILayer Pro at $49.99 is cheaper than ResumeJSON Mega at $99.

If APILayer's response carries every field you need, it is the cheaper option at steady volume. The case for ResumeJSON rests on the fields, the scans and the pay-per-use plan.

Who should stay with APILayer

• You only need a few fields. If your product fills in a name, an email and a skills tag cloud, the five-key response is enough and the Pro plan is good value.
• Your files are born-digital English CVs. That is what the page says the parser is tested on.
• You already hold an APILayer account. One key, one invoice and one dashboard across several APIs is a real convenience.
• The 15-second deletion statement matters to your compliance review. It is stated on their page in plain words, which makes that review short.

When ResumeJSON is the better fit

• You sort or filter by experience. Month-level start dates and an explicit current-job flag are what an applicant tracking system needs to rank candidates by tenure without a second pass.
• Candidates upload phone photos. A scan-reading path in the same endpoint saves you wiring OCR in front of the parser.
• You need to tell "missing" from "empty". A null for an unstated field is something your code can branch on.
• Volume is bursty. Pay-per-use with no monthly fee fits a job board whose uploads follow hiring seasons.

If you are still choosing between several vendors, our CV parser API comparison lays out the wider field, and bulk resume parsing covers running a backlog.

How to switch from APILayer

1. Parse ten of your own CVs on both. Our free parser needs no signup, so you can compare the output before paying anything.
2. Map the fields. name becomes basics.full_name, email becomes basics.email, experience[].organization becomes work[].company, and experience[].title becomes work[].title. skills stays a string array.
3. Change the call. APILayer sends your key in an apikey header. ResumeJSON takes x-rapidapi-key and x-rapidapi-host, and accepts the file as a multipart part, the raw body, or JSON text, on POST /v1/parse.
4. Drop the URL fetch if you used it. ResumeJSON takes the document itself, so download the file on your side and send the bytes.
5. Handle the new fields. Use is_current and the structured dates instead of parsing a year string, and read null as "not stated on the CV".

Then pick the plan that matches your real monthly volume on the pricing page, starting on the free tier while you test.